


we're all traitors in the end

by fensandmarshes



Series: make a home on the blade of your knife [2]
Category: Dream SMP (Video Blogging RPF)
Genre: (but not ghostbur), (except not quite), Anarchist Niki | Nihachu, Angst and Feels, But Oh Boy He's Talking, Character Study, Dead Wilbur Soot, Gen, Ghost Wilbur Soot, Mentioned Canonical Character Death, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Niki | Nihachu-centric, Post-Doomsday (Dream SMP), Reconciliation, Resurrected Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot Angst, post-tommy's finale stream, re-alivebur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:22:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28957113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fensandmarshes/pseuds/fensandmarshes
Summary: “Hey, Will,” she says, and hears the silence leer back.It is pointless, she knows. Visiting here. There is no body under the neatly-tended daises in this pretty little clearing (not cornflowers, never blue), and Niki has been disillusioned as to the truth of ghosts. But she is always kind, has built herself around it. She owes nothing to Wilbur’s ghost - walking or not - but she owes this visit to herself.Or: Niki visits Wilbur, just after Tommy has gotten his discs back, and receives a visit in return.
Relationships: Niki | Nihachu & Wilbur Soot
Series: make a home on the blade of your knife [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2151729
Comments: 25
Kudos: 149





	we're all traitors in the end

**Author's Note:**

> how the Fuck do you tag wilbur's (handwave) vital status at the moment. anyway i would like to clarify that this work is solely about dream smp characters rather than irl ccs!
> 
> the series this is in isn't really fics that are continuations of each other; rather they're all set in a loooosely-interconnected universe in which niki left and joined the anarchists after doomsday (and are thus canon divergent in the same manner).

Niki Nihachu knows grieving well; it has been a long time since she has found it insurmountable. Here, at the empty grave of a man who would call her a traitor if he were alive, Niki finds it possible - not easy, but she’s long past easy - to breathe around it.

“Hey, Will,” she says, and hears the silence leer back.

It is pointless, she knows. Visiting here. There is no body under the neatly-tended daises in this pretty little clearing (not cornflowers, never blue), and Niki has been disillusioned as to the truth of ghosts. But she is always kind, has built herself around it. She owes nothing to Wilbur’s ghost - walking or not - but she owes this visit to herself.

Niki Nihachu is a woman shaped by gentleness. In its absence - in the questions that glare her in the eye, _who are you, what are you DOING here_ as Technoblade presses an axe into her hands and she pores over battle-maps with the man who brought Wilbur his final death - in the absence of gentleness, she clings to what little kindness she still has. She makes herself out of it. This, more than anything else, is why she has risked herself to be here. L’Manberg is gone, but Wilbur’s empty grave lies a little way outside it, the grass untouched by its third and final death.

(That doesn’t seem right - surely Wilbur should be commemorated amongst the ruins of his own hubris, his gravestone just another piece of rubble that dared to challenge the gods - but Niki doesn’t let herself dwell on it. Both of them are dead, now, anyway. Will. L’Manberg. This grave is nothing but a stone which someone has carved a name into, planted daisies around; she hopes, but does not believe, that it was not Tommy.)

Regardless of its proximity, or lack thereof, to L’Manberg, it probably is not very safe or wise to be here. Niki doesn’t know the state of factions on the server at the moment, but she doubts any of them take too kindly to anarchists who openly align themselves with Technoblade. And word of her new allegiance has spread.

Wilbur would likely exile her for it, or maybe he would blame the sentence upon her petty little act of arson. If he were alive. If his nation still breathed, if there was anything left to exile her from. Niki breathes deeply - she has made peace with Wilbur being a tyrant, and she has made peace, too, with being a traitor herself. A traitor to a broken pipe dream of a country.

“You’d hate me, I think,” she says. “If you were here. That’s okay though.”

She can almost hear him, the promises he made her - a new world, a safe country, a band of friends against tyranny. A righteous rebellion. Empty, empty, empty words. She’s making her own promises now - swearing by new rules, declaring loyalties Will would never _deign_ to approve of. Part of her wishes he were alive, just so she could spit her new oaths in his face.

She doesn’t hate him. She wants to.

“I’m an _anarchist_ now, Will,” she says brightly, and imagines a wry laugh, a wary light to his eyes. He always was a cornered animal. Lashing out if you trapped him. Desperate to go free.

A sound rings in the wind - an inhale. She turns her head sharply. Hates the way her hand flies, quick and instinctual, to her new netherite sword.

But there is no one there.

Goosebumps chill the back of her neck, but she lets it be. The forest deserves a chance to keep its secrets. If someone is here, let them come; until they move against her, she will leave them be.

“And I’m safe,” she continues, lying to a dead man’s empty grave. She will have to get moving soon, if she isn’t alone. “Techno and Phil are very nice. They gave me armour, and a sword. And a home, you know. In the snow.”

She would like to make a bakery there, maybe. Something to bring a little warmth to the place. She could break bread with her new friends.

She wants to say _So, you don’t need to worry about me._ What comes out is, “I know you wouldn’t care.”

Her words ring through the silence. Breeze stirs the trees around her, and for a moment, defiant, she is the Nihachu that burned L’Mantree - furious, emboldened, untameable. She can almost smell the smoke, the distant gunpowder. Wilbur’s grave is _right there,_ its lettering neat against the stone, and Niki knows who fucking wrote it, and she is still _breathing_ and nothing is right and she calls up her pickaxe, takes two steps towards the gravestone and raises the netherite above her head as if to shatter it down the middle.

At the last moment she averts the downswing. A corner of the stone chips off, but that is all.

She watches it, breathing hard. Some of her hair has come loose from its braid and hangs in her face, and before she can tug it back, the wind lifts it gently back into place. It is as if the world is giving her a gentle rebuke: _haven’t you lost enough to your own fury, Niki Nihachu? Must you break more?_

“Yeah,” comes a voice, dry as desert earth, “you’ve done enough of that.”

Niki’s heart jumps into her throat. She drops the pick to draw her sword, feels panic rush like a mad tap-dance through her blood. “You are not real,” she challenges, and her eyes rove the clearing as if desperate to prove her wrong.

Wilbur’s voice, even after all these months, is familiar, and soothing, and the soundtrack to the worst times of her life; she hears it more in her nightmares than she does in wistful dreams. “If that’s what helps you sleep at night,” he offers, sardonic, and Niki bristles, and his tone softens unbearably, melting. “Niki, I -”

“I don’t want to hear you,” Niki spits. She cannot trust the way his voice jumps registers for her, is _gentle_ to her. She has no room for gentleness. If she closes her eyes, it is almost as if he is here - she keeps them desperately open. She did not come to his grave to hear him speak. She came here to take solace in the silence.

Wilbur’s voice says, reading her too well, unsettling and soft, “Are you angry, Niki, or are you scared? Tell me so that I can fix it.”

She squares her shoulders. Feels her heart rabbiting in his chest. She will not give this voice what he wants. “I burned the L’Mantree,” she tells him, and is furiously proud of it.

Wilbur’s laugh is startled and gleeful. “That’s fucking _brilliant,_ ” he says, and Niki imagines a feral gleam to his eye.

She lifts her chin. “I am an ally of Technoblade now. They formed a syndicate and I have joined it.”

“Hell yeah, good for you,” Wilbur says, vehement, and it’s so unexpected that she almost laughs.

All right, then. Wilbur Soot has taken his voice back from that stupid ghost, reclaimed its roughness and voice cracks; she is willing and ready to face him. Niki is done with being told who to be. If he is real, then very well. “I thought,” she says, and lets her hand drift away from her sword, “you would be furious.”

“Not much point,” comes Wilbur’s voice, nonchalant. There’s still an echo to it, and she wonders what that means.

“Would you exile me?” she asks.

His laugh comes like a punched-out thing, like a wild animal’s cry, feral. “From fucking _what,_ ” Wilbur offers, so very bitter. “L’Manberg is gone. Thrice now, I heard.”

“It was never meant to be,” counters Niki. Her voice is soft, she knows, and melodic, but she can speak cold fury like the best of them.

Wilbur chuckles.

“This is the part where you call me a traitor,” Niki tells him. Her words come out raspy.

“I blew that fucker into the _sky,_ ” Wilbur shoots back - the dead revolutionary, the emancipated man. “D’you really think I’d care you burned _one_ tree?”

Niki’s heart is - not working, or working too fast, but she takes giant gulps of breath, feels her lungs start to heal. She is angry and scared, and against her will her lips twitch into a smile. “I suppose,” she admits, “I may have been slightly hasty.”

(She is meant to be angry. But -)

“Just a little,” Wilbur agrees. She can hear an invisible smile in the way it colours his vowels, like a sunrise.

(She owes herself kindness. This is it.)

A laugh bubbles its way from Niki’s throat, startling her; it fights to go free and she lets it, joyful, still slightly incredulous. “How can I hear you, Will?” she asks him, half wondering if this is a dream. (A nightmare, it would be. She has woken from them enough times to know the score.) “Where are you speaking from?”

“Not quite sure,” Wilbur says, breezy and unconcerned. “Gave the kids some bullshit about planes of existence - I was having a nice time doing a whole lot of nothing, and now Tommy’s gone and fucked that all up, I guess. How about you?”

Annoyance flares in Niki’s chest - at Tommy’s name, at Wilbur’s flippancy - and she looks it in the eye and says _not right now, thank you._ “I’ve been living in the tundra,” she ventures cautiously. “I don’t know how much you heard -”

“Yeah. No. Enough,” Wilbur says. Then, quieter, “Oh, fuck -”

“Will -?”

“As cliche as it is,” Wilbur begins, and the trees stir again - murmuring _you burned her, you burned her_ \- “I don’t have a whole lot of time.”

“Oh,” says Niki. Grief is not something insurmountable, but suddenly it wells in her throat, an old friend, a bitter poisonous thing. Just like Will. “Does that - I mean, are you -”

“Un- _fucking-_ fortunately,” Wilbur’s voice comes, as if from a great distance, “I think I’ll be back.”

“Oh,” Niki repeats, and then _“Oh”_ to make it thrice. Three times her world has shifted, in the space of a minute. She rises abruptly. “If Tommy -”

“Give him a _break,_ would you,” Wilbur demands, suddenly petulant and whiny and _familiar._ “He’s just a kid. He’ll do better.”

Niki is the woman who burned L’Mantree, and the wind is picking up. “He has _had_ breaks,” she says, carefully controlled, “and chances and chances, time and _time again_ -”

“Niki,” Wilbur entreats.

She huffs. “Wilbur Soot.”

He laughs; it’s distant. “Okay, then. Give him room to try,” he suggests, “for me.”

“My allegiance is not to you,” Niki snaps. “I owe you nothing.”

“I know,” Wilbur agrees. “I’m not asking for your allegiance.” Quieter, “ _Fuck.”_

The trees are rustling so loudly, and his voice is so far away now, that she can barely make out his words. Fear stirs in her. “Then what are you asking,” she demands. “What do you want?”

The forest is silent in reply.

Niki Nihachu takes a breath, and then another, and sits down heavily in the middle of the daisy-covered clearing, the one that used to be a little way out of L’Manberg. Her sword tumbles to the ground beside her with a gentle thud. Suddenly, she is bone-tired. And acutely aware of how close she is to danger. And overall ready to head - well, she supposes, _home._

Part of her wants to assume that all of it was false, imagined, a trick. The rest of her knows that, for better or worse, it was real. Wilbur spoke. He was neither alive nor a ghost. The grave is still, and always was, empty - he came here not for a body but for her, for Niki Nihachu, traitor to a nation blown thrice to hell. Ally of the man who took Will’s final death. Niki Nihachu, who makes her own new promises.

She keeps no allegiance to Wilbur Soot. She owes him nothing. But she owes it to herself to be kind.

She stands, again, and takes up her dropped sword. She will fight if she has to - has learned that she can. But she can also make bread for her fellow anarchists, and build a new place without tyranny or rulers, and she - she will stay her blade, should Tommy decide he would like to pay a visit to the tundra.

She holds no allegiance to madmen. But she keeps her loyalty to her friends.

Niki Nihachu breathes, and breathes, and breathes. She, unlike L’Manberg, unlike Wilbur - for now - is still alive. And she will make the most of it.

She is the woman who burned L’Mantree. She has a new home among ice and snow. Somewhere between those extremes, Niki will make her own path.

She knows only one thing: it will be a kind one.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! i speedran this during a power outage in my notebook and haven't written by hand Forever so i apologise if it wasn't brilliant. consider leaving me a comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
